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Mark Steyn writes about President Future.
One of the reasons why Barack Obama is regarded as the greatest orator of our age is that he’s always banging on about some other age yet to come — e.g., the Future! A future of whose contours he is remarkably certain and boundlessly confident: The future will belong to nations that invest in education because the children are our future, but the future will not belong to nations that do not invest in green-energy projects because solar-powered prompters are our future, and most of all the future will belong to people who look back at the Obama era and marvel that there was a courageous far-sighted man willing to take on the tough task of slowing the rise of the oceans because the future will belong to people on viable land masses. This futuristic shtick is a cheap’n’cheesy rhetorical device (I speak as the author of a book called “After America,” whose title is less futuristic than you might think) but it seems to play well with the impressionable Obammysoxers of the press corps.
And so it was with President Obama’s usual visionary, inspiring, historic, etc., address to the U.N. General Assembly the other day: “The future must not belong to those who bully women,” he told the world, in a reference either to Egyptian clitoridectomists or the Republican party, according to taste. “The future must not belong to those who target Coptic Christians,” he added. You mean those Muslim guys? Whoa, don’t jump to conclusions. “The future must not belong to those who slander the Prophet of Islam,” he declared, introducing to U.S. jurisprudence the novel concept of being able to slander a bloke who’s been dead for getting on a millennium and a half now. If I understand correctly the cumulative vision of the speech, the future will belong to gay feminist ecumenical Muslims. You can take that to the bank. But make no mistake, as he would say, and in fact did: “We face a choice between the promise of the future or the prisons of the past, and we cannot afford to get it wrong.” Because if we do, we could spend our future living in the prisons of the past, which we forgot to demolish in the present for breach of wheelchair-accessibility codes.
And the crowd went wild! Well, okay, they didn’t. They’re transnational bureaucrats on expense accounts, so they clapped politely, and then nipped out for a bathroom break before the president of Serbia. But, if I’d been one of the globetrotting bigwigs fortunate enough to get an invite — the prime minister of Azerbaijan, say, or the deputy tourism minister of Equatorial Guinea — I would have responded: Well, maybe the future will belong to those who empower women and don’t diss Mohammed. But maybe it’ll belong to albino midgets who wear pink thongs. Who knows? Que sera sera, whatever will be will be, the future’s not ours to see. But one thing we can say for certain is that the future will not belong to broke losers. You’re the brokest guy in the room, you’re the president of Brokistan. You’ve got to pay back $16 trillion just to get back to having nothing, nada, zip. Who the hell are you to tell us who the future’s going to belong to?
The excitable lads around the globe torching American embassies with impunity seem to have figured this out, even if the striped-pants crowd at TurtleBay are too polite to mention it. Obama is not the president of the Future. He is president right now, and one occasionally wishes the great visionary would take his eye off the far-distant horizon where educated women and fire-breathing imams frolic and gambol side by side around their Chevy Volts, to focus on the humdrum present where the rest of us have the misfortune to live. …
Yesterday Charles Krauthammer wanted Mitt to go large. Now Josh Kraushaar suggests it is time for Romney to think outside the box.
Rereading Walter Isaacson’s biography of the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs, it’s hard not be struck by one passage illustrating the late Apple CEO’s philosophy about focus groups and survey data: He ignored it. In his mind, he had a vision for what the iPhone should look like, and it was his job to convince consumers that they absolutely needed a touch-screen phone that could play music and surf the Internet, even though few people were clamoring for it.
Mitt Romney’s struggling campaign could use a little of the Jobs business plan — coming up with a grand vision for the future and making a case for it throughout the country. Instead, the candidate with the mind of a consultant has become obsessed with persuading the micro-demographic groups who remain undecided. So there’s an ad about coal in Ohio and Virginia, a “Dear Daughter” ad transparently trying to win over women, and even a Republican National Committee ad featuring a female Hispanic voter “breaking up” with a cardboard cutout of President Obama.
Micro-targeting has worked like a charm for Obama’s campaign, which has avoided talking about the president’s record in favor of mobilizing a base of young voters, minorities, and abortion rights-supporting women to carve out a bare majority. But it’s a questionable strategy for his Republican challenger, who badly needs an overarching vision that appeals to Americans dissatisfied with Obama’s performance in office and struggling in a stagnant economy.
If Bill Clinton served as Team Obama’s masterful defense lawyer at the Democratic National Convention, there’s been little attempt since by the Romney campaign to rebut the argument that Obama’s doing the best he can under the troubling circumstances he inherited. There’s little attempt at making the connection between the president’s unpopular first-term policies — the health care law, the stimulus bill, cap-and-trade energy regulations — and the sorry state of the U.S. economy. …
Human Events on the people leaving California.
… Business owners talk not just about the costs, but about harassment by myriad government tax and regulatory agencies that often treat them like criminals. Freedom is on the decline as government gains more authority to micromanage virtually everything. Just check out the kind of bills the governor is now signing into law. (I love Steve Breen’s cartoon, which says, “If you’re a Californian and want to start a small business, there are a number of different routes you could take.” It then shows the various Interstate highways that lead to other states.)
Yet Brown insists that California is still “the land of dreams.” And some academics say the talk about a California exodus to other states is not true. In May, University of Southern California Professor Dowell Myers argued that we shouldn’t believe “the tales of gloom. Californians aren’t fleeing.” The main problem, he wrote, is Californians don’t spend enough public money on schools.
This is where I want to bang my head against the wall. There have been some reductions in per-pupil public-school spending from 2008, given California’s budget problems.
But these reductions come after massive spending increases in previous years and Prop. 98 mandates 40 percent of the general fund goes to K-14 education. Schooling is so important, yet California’s leaders have been resistant to imposing the real reforms that will improve schools through competition and teacher testing — ideas that run afoul of the powerful California Teachers Association.
Despite these delusions, productive people are leaving and they will do so more rapidly if this “just tax and spend more” advice is followed.
A new study from the Manhattan Institute called “The Great California Exodus: A Closer Look” offers a reality check. Yes, Californians are fleeing mostly for pro-growth states with a better tax and regulatory climate. California used to be a destination state, but has outsourced 3.4 million residents in the past 22 years. …
Late Night from Andrew Malcolm.
Fallon: Stevie Wonder will do a fundraiser for President Obama this month. And then Stevie will return to his other gig — as an NFL replacement ref.
Conan: Patriots Coach Bill Belichick got so mad about a call by a replacement referee he grabbed his arm. Fortunately Belichick was stopped by the ref’s seeing-eye dog.